David Raksin
Remembers his Colleagues

David Raksin

Since I expect
to be present at the showing of some of the films I have scored, I
thought I would skip autobiographics and instead recount a few
stories that illustrate some of the vicissitudes unique to the career
of a film composer.

Meeting the
Director of Force of EvilI had been
summoned to meet the director of my next assignment, who turned out
to be an amiable roughneck about my age, bright and shrewd, and New
Yorky enough to let me know he didn't want "any of that
Hollywood music" in his picture. What he wanted was
"something different-like Wozzeck." A string of
three-frame cuts of the aurora borealis flashed before my eyes: a
director who actually knows how to pronounce the cherished name of
Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece and believes that his film needs
that kind of expressive music-I could almost feel the shackles
falling away from my talent!

I invited him
out to my Northridge farm for dinner so that we could talk, away from
studio distractions.

So there we
were in the living room with drinks in hand, the phonograph playing
and the conversation taking its time to get under way. I remember
thinking that this was the way things ought to be: I liked his script
and I couldn't wait to hear what he had to say and to get working on
the music. Suddenly irritated, he said, "What's that crap you're
playing?" "That crap," I replied, "is
Wozzeck!" That happened more than forty years ago, and if there
is a story that tells more about why film composers sometimes despair
of their profession, I have yet to hear it.

A Game of
Tests With The MaestroIn the autumn
of 1936 I returned from a working trip in England to join the
composing staff at Universal Studio. There I found myself
collaborating with several colleagues on music for various films
whose sole unifying characteristic seems to have been the necessity
to produce scores in no more than a few days the rush was
the name by which this debilitating process was known. After a month
or so of this, I had a call from Leo Forbstein, head of the music
department at Warner Bros. studio, who had heard about the music I
was composing from his younger brother, a secondary executive at
Universal. The result was an agreement to work for Warner's on
weekends not required by my home studio.

On
"free" Fridays I would appear at the projection room of
Forbstein's group, where I would be shown bits and pieces of Warner
movies for which I was expected to produce music to be recorded
during the following week. I saw only special footage such as main or
end titles, chases and montages-sequences in which the music would be
relatively audible. In most cases there was hardly time to learn what
the rest of the story was about-let alone to see the entire film. In
this haphazard way I became a kind of featured link in a
super-assembly line; for example, I didn't learn until months later
that the star of one of the movies I worked on was Bette Davis. I had
only done a few of these madhouse stints when Forbstein informed me
that I would no longer be working for him. Not having caught the sly
grimace that accompanied this unwelcome bit of news, I was
crestfallen-until he explained that he had been hiring me for those
weekends from Universal for more money than they paid me per week. He
now proposed to employ me without that studio as intermediary-an
endorsement of my talent that more than doubled my income. This
lasted for a while, until Charles Previn, head of Universal's music
department, offered me the plum assignment of working as assistant to
Leopold Stokowski, who had come to the studio to provide the music
for a new film, ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL, which would feature
Universal's youthful star, Deanna Durbin. Of course I leaped at the
chance, and soon found myself in the presence of the great man.

I am a
Philadelphian by birth and by inclination and was thrilled to be
working with a personal idol, the conductor of my favorite symphony
orchestra. My father had often played in the Philadelphia Orchestra,
when an extra clarinetist or bass clarinetist or perhaps a
saxophonist (for Bizet's l'Arlesienne Suite II or Ravel's
transcription of Pictures at an
Exhibition) was required. Stokowski, whose remarkable memory must
have recognized the significance of the name, did not bring this up,
so neither did I. But he did attempt to determine whether I was equal
to the demands of the position by casually proposing what were
actually tests of my resourcefulness.

He began by
giving me the first movement of a Beethoven piano sonata, of which I
was to put the first section into score for symphony orchestra. He
had marked it thoroughly with instructions concerning instrumental
colors, doublings, etc. [I am therefore an informed witness in the
matter of Stokowski transcriptions, which have often been
mis-attributed to others by gossip mongers. I can testify that the
task which he assigned me was not much more than glorified copying,
and definitely not the work of a transcriber. Is it too much to hope
that this will help to lay some of the wicked rumors to rest?] Of
course I turned up the next morning with the score finished, as far
as it went. Stokowski approved of everything (as well he might, since
it was according to his wishes) except for one small item, where I
had substituted an E-flat clarinet for the B-flat one he had
expected. His raised eyebrow asked why. "Mr. Stokowski," I
said, "if I had used a B-flat clarinet there, it would have had
to rise out of the chalumeau (the lower register) into the
upper register, and the tone quality would change." Amused, he agreed.

The next
"test" came the following Friday. "I would like Miss
Durbin to sing the aria of the Queen of Shemakha from Le Coq d'Or, so
I will need the score at once." A breeze, thought I: everybody
knows the marvelous aria of the Queen of Sheba, from Rimsky-Korsakov's
opera, The Golden Cockerel, with its sinuous descending
chromatics. It should be easy to find. Sure! What we all
"knew" was the version of the piece that appears in the
orchestral suite, not the aria. So, realizing that the Eastern
seaboard opera houses and music stores and libraries would be closing
for the weekend at 2:00 pm, our time, I began to call every place I
could think of. Everybody seemed to have the orchestra suite, but
nobody had the opera aria or could offer any idea of where to find it.

I tried the
Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic and the 58th street Music
Library in New York, the Boston Opera, the Boston Symphony, the
Philadelphia Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Free Library and
Fleischer Collection, all kinds of music publishers, libraries and
stores in other East Coast cities. The time deadline soon passed, so
I began to canvass other areas, gradually moving west-running up
Universal's telephone bill. My unhappy suspicions were soon
corroborated: plenty of suites, but no arias. By the time I finished
talking to the San Francisco Opera people, Los Angeles Philharmonic
librarians and several of the film studio music libraries, I realized
that I was in trouble.

Still I knew
that the elusive aria had to be somewhere, even that Stokowski must
have performed it, but 1 could not bring myself to compromise the
situation by asking him. Suddenly a dim light went on in my cranial
attic, and I had my first real clue: somewhere in the Los Angeles
area lived a former studio music librarian named Earl Wilson, who was
reputed to have "all kinds of offbeat stuff." He had to be
my man, especially since he was almost certainly my last man.

I knew just
where to look for Earl Wilson. Out came the tattered old copies of
the Musicians Union directory that every studio department saves, for
reasons best known to pack rats and warehousemen. And sure enough,
there was Mr. Wilson, somewhere in the northwestern reaches of the
San Fernando Valley among the surviving estancias. All it took
was a telephone call, but when I asked the big question it turned out
that the score was still beyond my grasp-he didn't have one.
"Earl," I said, "what about the parts ?"
meaning the parts for individual instruments. "Have you
possibly got a set of them?" "Parts?," said the voice
on the other end, "Sure I got 'em-out in the barn somewhere."

My next move
was to commandeer a company car, black, with chauffeur, and to join
Earl in a search for the elusive music, which we found straight-away.
I thanked him profusely and promised to bring it back in a few days.
Returning to the studio, I put in a call for a fine copyist of the
old school-a splendid musician, and in half an hour I was with him in
his modest flat on the second floor of a dilapidated house on
Hollywood Boulevard. Harry Cockayne was an elderly English gentleman,
very frail actually, retired, I knew, and still supporting himself
and his invalid wife. I showed him the set of orchestra parts: 12
woodwind parts, 11 brass and horns, 3 percussion, harp, violins I and
II, viola, cello and bass-not a very long piece. "Harry," I
said, "can you combine these into a score for me? You can do it
in pencil if you prefer-but I need it by Monday." Mr. Cockayne
assured me that it would be ready by Sunday evening, and I promised
him I would see to it that he was paid three times the Union's
copying rate.

According to
plan I picked up the pencil score on Sunday, and spent the rest of
the evening checking to see whether it was accurate, which it was in
every detail. Bless you, dear Harry! The next morning I walked into
Stokowski's bungalow at Universal and casually tossed the score onto
his desk. Of course he knew what a task he had set me, the more so
because it came on the eve of a weekend-so that my casual gesture was
more than a bit snippy, and I probably deserved a sharp lecture. But
the maestro was a most generous-hearted gentleman, with a gracious
sense of humor, so he settled for a raised eyebrow and a quiet
admonition. "Hm," he said, "very funny." Which is
what comes of living a charmed life-in this case, mine.

Music Via A
Devious RootNot long after
I had composed the score of LAURA, and the picture was in theatrical
release, I was deluged with mail from people who wanted to get the
music of the theme. At a time when it was considered a big deal to
receive half a dozen letters, I finally stopped counting mine when
they reached 1700. Others--Darryl Zanuck, head of production at 20th
Century-Fox Studio; Otto Preminger, director of the film, and the
stars: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson and
Vincent Price -received hundreds more. Among those addressed to me
was one I found quite fascinating.

At that time
one of the decisive battles of World War II had just been concluded.
A large contingent of American troops had been surrounded by the
German Army near the Belgian town of Bastogne, in the Ardennes
Forest. The German commander demanded that they surrender
immediately, to which his American opposite, McAuliffe, replied,
"Nuts!" (or so we were told). Some military strategists
deny that there ever was a real "Battle of the Bulge" at
Bastogne, but a powerful conflict did take place, in which a
relieving American army fought their way in while the trapped forces
fought their way out, defeating the encircling Wehrmacht. The
victorious American troops were rewarded with a period of Rest and
Recreation, and it was from this camp that one of our soldiers sent
me the letter I found so remarkable.

"I saw
LAURA here at R & R the other night," he wrote, "and
liked your music; and I recognized that you took the theme from
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." Now, I've heard some weird
attributions concerning the source of various renowned musical ideas
in my time, but this truly took the prize. Remember, if you can, the
principal theme of LAURA (which is also known as a popular song), and
try to match it with the great melody of Beethoven's final symphony
in D minor. (If you can manage that, I've got a ton of low-grade lead
you ought to be able to transmute by alchemy into gold.)

However, I
could not leave a letter from a soldier who had survived such an
ordeal unanswered. So, gathering what wits I still had about me after
years of scoring films, I replied, somewhat as follows: "Since
you are the only one who has understood how I composed my LAURA
theme, I feel I owe you an explanation. What I did was to take the
slow movement of the Ninth, the one before the Scherzo. I found a
section where the celli were in tenor clef, then turned it upside
down and pretended that the music was in alto clef. Having done that,
I then took every third note and put them together to form the new
theme now known as Laura. How you figured that out for yourself is
beyond me; but having done so, you deserve nothing less than a full
description of the method I used."

I'm writing
this down at the end of November 1993. In mid-October I attended the
Flounders Film Festival in Gent, Belgium. There, in the course of a
symposium, I was asked to talk a bit about the music of LAURA, and I
recounted the above story. Next day, an interviewer who had attended
that session told me that when I finished my cockamamie
"explanation" another journalist, seated next to him, said,
"Well ... at least he's honest."

Timing is
Everything--Or Is It?November 1960:
my wife Jo and I were eagerly anticipating the arrival of our first
child. Very late in the evening of the 8th I awoke to find her in
pain, which to me meant that her "time" must be near. Jo is
a rather stoic person, so it took some persuading to get her to call
our doctor, who immediately said to me, "Get her to the
hospital-now!" In comparatively little time she was being
examined by a young intern at the old Cedars of Lebanon hospital, who
pronounced her not quite ready.

I had already
been through incipient fatherhood before, so I was trying to be cool
about things so as not to add to her own concerns. But I had another
problem: I was about halfway through composing a sequence for one of
my film scores, which had to be in the hands of the Studio copyists
next morning, for a recording that afternoon. So, in order to make
the best of a difficult situation, I set myself up in her room with a
table and a shaded light, and began to work.

All the time,
I was carefully watching her and wondering why the nurses weren't.
After a while I went to the nursing station and said to the nurse
assigned to her that Jo was now having labor pains about every twelve
seconds, and their duration varied from about six seconds to a bit
longer. Visibly annoyed, the young woman followed me back into Jo's
room, where we arrived just at the onset of a rather severe pain.
"That," I said, "lasted four-and-a half seconds."
The nurse glared at me, but waited till the next spasm, at which I
said, "Time between pains was nine seconds, and that one was
four seconds." Now the nurse was quite annoyed with me.
"Have you got a stopwatch-or something?" she asked.
"No," said I. With a panicky look, she rushed out and soon
returned with the intern. From their attitude it was clear that they
thought they were dealing with some kind of freak.

Together they
waited through the onset of three pains; in each case I called the
time of the intervals and the duration of the spasms. The intern, who
had been timing the events with his stopwatch, looked at me quite
incredulously, then he and the nurse dashed out to call our
obstetrician, Leon Krohn, who was also Chief of Staff at Cedars and
who arrived in time to usher into our world the dearest little boy
ever born to deserving parents.

Leon, a
personal friend, who had also delivered my first son, by a former
marriage, and would later bring into the world our beloved new
daughter, Valentina, had been told about the marvels of timing
accomplished by-of all things-a husband, and wanted to know how I did it.

With pleasure,
I explained that I had been using a method often employed by film
composers: I had been timing Jo's labor pains by counting clicks, a
mechanical system analogous to the metronome, which is used to
compute intervals in timing and for synchronization. 12-frame
clicks, in fact. At film-sound speed, 12 frames equals half a
second; two of them equal a second, and I had often used that trick
to surprise dental X-ray people. After testing me a bit, Dr. Krohn
was delighted, and so were Jo and I; and we have remained so during
the time we brought up the wonderful young man, our Alexander, who is
now Deputy Book Editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Copyright
1995 by David Raksin. Published on the ACO website with the kind
permission of the author